It is common for many Romantics, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to locate the spontaneous, unsullied, and sustained flow of imaginative thought processes within dreams. We must remember that many of the Romantics understood and maintained that the imagination was a way to access truth and experience sensations of transcendence in ways heretofore not understood or described by philosophers and religious spiritual leaders. This ideology of the imagination was inherited, taken up, and refined by many Victorian authors, and it still finds ideological validity and influence within our contemporary moment in such texts as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. That aside, within Christina Rossetti’s “Dream Land” and “Echo,” we may find not only a Victorian inheritance from Romanticism in that the narrator expresses a desire to access knowledge and memories within dreams but also Pre-Raphaelite influences from her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in the juxtaposition of the sensual and the sentimental.
As stated above, Rossetti’s “Echo” entails a nostalgic desire to access knowledge and memories in a dream: “Come to me in the silence of the night; / Come in the speaking silence of a dream” (1-2). If understood as standing in relation to Romantic sentiments of the imagination and dreams, where Rossetti differs from the Romantics is the way she weaves the potential harmony of the sensual and the sentimental. She goes on to write, “Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright / As sunlight on a stream; / Come back in tears, / Oh memory, hope, love of finished years” (3-6). Here, she vividly appeals to sensory perception (sight) but also maintains a sentimental nostalgia. In other words, she utilizes the vocabulary of sensual appeal and gratification to express the soul’s desire to be satiated. For example, she writes, “Where thirsting longing eyes / Watch the slow door…Come back to me in dreams, that I may give / Pulse for pulse, breath for breath: / Speak low, lean low, / As long ago, my love, how long ago!” (10-11, 14-17). This echo, this memory, when re-experienced in the dream-state, awakens an ease of access to sensuous and sentimental vividity. Within “Dream Land,” she describes this internal imaginative state as “where shadows are / Her pleasant lot” (7-8), the “heart’s core” (27), and “Her perfect peace” (32).
As stated above, Rossetti’s “Echo” entails a nostalgic desire to access knowledge and memories in a dream: “Come to me in the silence of the night; / Come in the speaking silence of a dream” (1-2). If understood as standing in relation to Romantic sentiments of the imagination and dreams, where Rossetti differs from the Romantics is the way she weaves the potential harmony of the sensual and the sentimental. She goes on to write, “Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright / As sunlight on a stream; / Come back in tears, / Oh memory, hope, love of finished years” (3-6). Here, she vividly appeals to sensory perception (sight) but also maintains a sentimental nostalgia. In other words, she utilizes the vocabulary of sensual appeal and gratification to express the soul’s desire to be satiated. For example, she writes, “Where thirsting longing eyes / Watch the slow door…Come back to me in dreams, that I may give / Pulse for pulse, breath for breath: / Speak low, lean low, / As long ago, my love, how long ago!” (10-11, 14-17). This echo, this memory, when re-experienced in the dream-state, awakens an ease of access to sensuous and sentimental vividity. Within “Dream Land,” she describes this internal imaginative state as “where shadows are / Her pleasant lot” (7-8), the “heart’s core” (27), and “Her perfect peace” (32).